NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has developed a global Land Information System (LIS; http://lis.gsfc.nasa.gov) capable of modeling land-atmosphere interactions at spatial resolutions down to 1km. LIS consists of several land surface models run offline using observationally-based precipitation, radiation and meteorological inputs, and surface parameters including MODIS-based Leaf Area Index (LAI). The high spatial resolution of LIS makes it capable of resolving urban areas, and a key area of ongoing work is updating land surface models to represent the impacts of engineered surfaces (buildings, roads, parking lots, sidewalks, etc.) on mesoscale land-atmosphere interactions, including water, energy, and momentum fluxes. We will present results demonstrating LIS applied at a 5km resolution globally, including an analysis of urban thermal and radiative impacts for cities around the world. We will also present results from a 1km case study for the city of Houston, TX, in which simulations incorporating the MODIS LAI, albedo, and emissivity products are evaluated against the 5km global results.